Covering roller bodies with a wear surface comprising wear-resistant materials is well-known in the art of milling. The wear surface may comprise wear-resistant materials implemented by wear-resistant studs implemented in the surface or as in wear-resistant rollers of the abovementioned kind comprise welding beads with high contents of carbide. Carbides has long been known to have a hardness close to that of diamond and has consequently been used extensively for cutting or grinding in situations requiring extreme resistance to wear and abrasions. Welding beads comprising wear and abrasion resistant materials welded on a roller is often referred to as hardfacing of the roller. Using studded technologies is often too expensive either to install or maintain, and often also inadequate when working with very high pressures such as in roller mills or roller crushers due to failure of attachment to the roller body. The wear-resistant material of which the studs are made is very expensive and since a part of each stud is embedded in the roller for fastening the stud, and only a smaller portion of the stud protrudes from the roller surface and is actually utilized as wear-resistant material, most of the expensive material is not subjected to wear, which is a poor utilization of the wear-resistant material.
Hardfacing on the other hand has the advantage of being less expensive, fairly easy to maintain and capability of withstanding extremely high pressures. However, a well-known disadvantage of hardfacing is the lack of gripping capability when a hard-faced surface is worn sometimes even only slightly worn. Wear on hard-faced surfaces typically results in the wear surface very quickly becoming completely smooth drastically decreasing the crushing effectiveness of the roller. In order to counter this effect, new layers of hardfacing must frequently be welded to the surface in appropriate patterns leading to increased downtimes of the mills using the hard-faced rollers.
Therefore it would be advantageous to be able to use hard-faced surfaces while maintaining a structured surface like the studded surface for maximum gripping capability in order to optimize the wear-resistance of the roller, maintain a high grinding efficiency to increase the service life of the roller,